Pirates!

Arr! Pirates off the port bow!

News of a supertanker getting hijacked by pirates off the coast of East Africa has dominated international headlines this week. Pirates? If you haven't been paying attention, you can be forgiven for thinking that bearded men with wooden legs were terrorizing the high seas.

Last week, pirates succeeded in hijacking the Sirius Star, an enormous oil tanker carrying two million barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia. The ship's 25 crewmembers and cargo, worth more than $100 million, are being held for ransom. This event has sparked panic in global commodities markets, as if the world's economy needed more problems. According to the pirates though, it's the world's economy and the pollution it creates that gives them grief.

For the past six months, modern-day Somali pirates have been hijacking cargo ships passing through the narrow waterways between Somalia and Yemen. These pirates are mostly poor, ex-fishermen accompanied by the odd computer geek and strongman. The fishermen navigate and pilot the ships while the techies maintain the GPS and other high-tech equipment necessary for each pirate mission. The strongmen, armed with AK-47s, hijack the ships with the aid of speedboats. The pirates mostly refrain from violence though.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and India make the pirates out to be villains looking to score a quick profit and wreak anarchy. Well, what's wrong with a little anarchy?

The West's thirst for oil has brought the entire world to the brink of environmental and economic disaster. Any move that disrupts the oil trade and forces governments to shift towards renewable sources of energy is a positive one.

There's also the untold story of Somalia's ravaged shorelines. The shipping traffic that passes off the country's coast from the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea has left large tracts of Somalia's coast heavily contaminated.

Without international concern, the pollution never gets cleaned up and it is the local inhabitants who suffer. In fact, the pirates insist that its the pollution and general indifference from the rest of the world that spurs them on, not ransom money.

But the real tragedy here is Somalia itself. Without a functional government for almost two decades, Somalia's problems have been deliberately ignored by Western nations and have now come back to haunt us.

It's only when the West's own selfish interests in oil and trade routes are threatened that the global eye shifts towards this failed state. It shouldn't have to take the reckless actions of a desperate few for the world's leaders to take notice of Somalia.

The ultimate lesson for us all is that poverty and suffering on the other side of the world is our problem too. Somalia's problems may seem far away, but if this episode teaches us anything, it's that we cannot afford to ignore the suffering of others anywhere in the world. To continue to do so is to invite these problems to our own doorstep in the form of hijacked ships, or worse, hijacked planes.

=//Turnquest